What are you reading the week of February 18, 2023?

Last weekend, I read Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses which was a mediocre entry in the Inspector Maigret series.

I just finished Andrey Kurkov's Grey Bees. Kurkov is a Russian-Ukrainian writer. He was born in Russia, but he grew up in Ukraine. Grey Bees was published in 2018. It's the story of a divorced, retired mine inspector who lives in the grey zone west of Donetsk. The grey zone is a sort of no-man's land between the Ukrainian and Russian lines. the main character, Sergei Sergeyich is one of the last two remaining residents of his village. The only other resident is a childhood "frenemy" named Pashka. For three years they have lived without electricity, heating their homes with coal provided for free by a local Baptist church. Sergei's days are spent tending to his six bee hives. The first third of the novel is a slow, meditative story of life in the grey zone. When spring arrives, he loads his hives onto a trailer an travels across southern Ukraine, eventually coming to rest in Russian occupied Crimea. He meets a variety of characters along the way, a Ukrainian veteran with PTSD, an FSB agent, the family of a Crimean Tatar beekeeper who has been missing for two years, and many others. Sergei is a kind, gentle every man who becomes involved in the lives of the people he meets on his journey. I loved this book and was sad to have to say goodbye to the characters. It's well worth the read.

Currently working on The Spare Man (which I'm having doubts about continuing with (speed read here we come)). After that I'm looking at The First Victory and The Courtesan and the Gigolo.

OverDrive audio ~

Exiles: A Novel
by Jane Harper
(latest Aaron Falk novel/Australia)

Currently reading:
SF/F
Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
Other
A Fugue in Time by Rumer Godden
Harbour Street by Ann Cleeves

Finished The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves. Really enjoyed it.

I'm about 60 pages into Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott. This is a recent novel that I'm reading on my wife's request because she loved it so well and wanted to be able to discuss with me. It's a book rooted in magical realism about a pair of adult siblings who inherit a semi-alive house with legs. 60 pages in, I don't think I'm loving it quite as much as my wife did, but it's enjoyable enough, certainly.

I just started Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel for book club. It's had some promising beginning chapters.

Finished The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. Enjoyed it just as much the second time around. Added Miniatures: the Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi to my rotation

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky|
3.5/5 stars
Kurlansky is one of my favorite writers and in this book he writes about the history of the Cod fish and the cod fish industry in this book. Though this was not my favorite of all his books it was quite interesting. I learned a lot of information about Cod fish and industrial fishing. There is also a section on cod recipes.

The Opposite of Everyone – Joshilyn Jackson
Audiobook performed by the author
3.5***

Paula Vauss was born Kali Jai in Alabama. Her free-spirited young mother, Kai, was an itinerant storyteller who blended Hindu mythology with southern oral traditions to reinvent their history as they roved. But everything changed when Kai landed in prison and Paula went to foster care. Now Paula is a high-powered divorce attorney in Atlanta. While she hasn’t seen her mother in fifteen years, she’s still trying to make amends with regular checks, hoping to erase the karmic debt. Then her check is returned with a typical Kai note: “I’m going on a journey. I’m going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. A few months later Paula discovers she was not Kai’s only child, and the race to find her mother begins.

I really like Jackson’s books. I love her quirky Southern characters, with their colorful sayings and folk wisdom. I frequently want to shake some sense into them, and more often want to sit down with them over a few glasses of wine and just get to know them better.

I found myself immersed in Paula’s present crisis pretty quickly. However improbable the many coincidences, I bought her story hook-line-and-sinker. There is more than one broken character here, but they learn to rely on one another and take steps toward healing. Jackson used flashbacks to Paula’s time in foster care very effectively.

Jackson is, herself, a talented voice artist and she narrates the audiobook. I love the voices she gave to Paul, Julia and Kai.

Added The Garden (Into Shadow collection) by Tomi Champion-Adeyemi to my rotation.

I finished On the Black Hill which is a quiet atmospheric tale of character and place; the place being a farm on the Welsh/English border and the characters a set of twins, their parents and neighbors.

I finished Thistlefoot, an inventive if not always well written novel based on Slavic & Jewish mythology. My review is posted on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Now I'm back to An Easy Burden, Civil Rights Movement leader Andrew Young's memoir/autobiography.

Finisshed The Garden (Into Shadow collection) by Tomi Champion-Adeyemi and Persephone (Into Shadow collection) by Lev Grossman.

Reading vol. II of Thomas B. Costain's historical novel, The Tontine. One chapter a night for Lime Spouse's and my read-aloud book. Can he ever write a story; it's as if Dickens and Thackeray had been rolled into one.

The new thread is up over here.